Killer IQ Part 8: Is It In Their Nature?

The final intelligence listed in Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences is naturalistic.  This intelligence has to do with nature,  nurturing and relating information to one's natural surroundings.  People who rank high in this form of intelligence are supposed to having a greater sensitivity to nature, to better understand their place in it, and to be able to handle plants, crops, and animals.  Noticing changes in weather, the differences in species, and other such things about their natural surroundings are also abilities those might have with this intelligence.  In order to learn best they must connect a new experience with earlier information gained; collecting and analyzing, being outside, kinesthetic ways (doing physical activity), or in dealing with things prominent in nature, are all ways in which they learn best.  Careers which suit those with this intelligence include scientists, naturalists, conservationists, gardeners and farmers.

It's Not Natural

I hesitate to even write on this intelligence since it wasn't originally part of Gardner's original Theory of Multiple Intelligences (it was added in 1997) and has often been criticized as and interest and not really indicative of intelligence.  However, it is on the list and, for those who might live almost entirely off of nature it remains an indispensable intelligence.   ...Now the question is...are there any killers who live off the land, so to speak?

Not really, no.  Those people who live off the land in these modern times do so either almost completely on their own or in small (usually native) communities and neither those to ways of life make for the sort of victim pool or anonymity required to be a killer, let alone serial killer, with any actual success.  The closest one might get is bomber, Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski (aka The Unabomber) when, in 1973, he moved to Lincoln, Montana, to live off the land.  ...He was successful at it for the most part, even as the modern world imposed by cutting down the forest around him, but that really didn't have much to do with his abilities as a bomb maker.  Even though he did use more natural pieces (plugs to the bombs made of handcrafted wood, etc) at the start of his bombings, the intelligence used in creating and constructing the bombs themselves required logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, and even bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, not natural.